The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Big Horn

harassing the troopers and especially their horses. The arrow could be launched in a high, arching curve without betraying the location of the warrior with a telltale cloud of black powder smoke. “The arrows falling upon the horses stuck in their backs,” Wooden Leg remembered, “and caused them to go plunging here and there, knocking down the soldiers.”
    Some of the warriors grew impatient with the slow creep toward the enemy. Remaining mounted, they rode back and forth in front of the soldiers, inviting them to fire. One of these was Sitting Bull’s nephew White Bull. Leaning over the side of his bareback pony while he clung to the mane with both hands, White Bull set out on a daring bravery run that elicited a crackling shower of carbine fire. There were others, Wooden Leg remembered, who challenged the soldiers to shoot at them. Several times Keogh’s soldiers attempted to check the rising tide of warriors with a volley or two, but for the most part the firing on both sides remained haphazard and ineffective. According to Kate Bighead, this period of “fighting slowly, with not much harm to either side” lasted for close to an hour and a half.

    —THE LAST STAND, June 25, 1876 —

    A s anyone who has ridden a horse across the Little Bighorn Battlefield knows, once you are down within the smothering embrace of this grassy landscape, you have no way of knowing what is happening around you. It is quite likely that as the troopers of the Left Wing worked their way north, they found themselves in a surprisingly quiet, self-contained world, almost completely insulated from the growing sense of alarm gripping the officers and men of the Right Wing to the south.
    About a mile to the north, Custer, Yates, and the Left Wing found a buffalo trail that led down from the ridge to the river. As they approached the Little Bighorn, a group of young Cheyenne warriors fired on them from the hills behind. Ahead of them, on the south side of a wide loop in the river, was what they were looking for: a ford that provided access to the noncombatants gathered a short distance to the west.
    Concealed in the brush beside the river was a group of Cheyenne warriors. As had occurred earlier at Medicine Tail Coulee, the warriors opened fire as soon as the Left Wing approached the river. “[The warriors] hit one horse down there,” Hanging Wolf remembered, “and it bucked off a soldier, but the rest took him along when they retreated north.” As had also been true during Custer’s earlier venture to the river, this was a reconnaissance mission, and the troopers quickly turned back.
    Whether it was fired by the Indians stationed at the ford or by those in the hills to the east, one of the warriors’ bullets struck and killed the newspaper reporter Mark Kellogg. Three days later, the reporter’s body, all by itself along the remote reaches of the river, was one of the last to be discovered.
    Having found a place to cross the river, Custer and the Left Wing rode up to a nearby ridge, where they awaited the arrival of Keogh and Benteen. They waited for twenty minutes, according to John Stands in Timber, who received his information from Wolf’s Tooth, one of the young Cheyenne warriors who had been following Custer’s command since it left the Right Wing to the south. By this point, Custer must have been seething with impatience and indignation. The collapse of Reno’s battalion had been unfortunate, but it had also prepared the way for a masterstroke to the north—a masterstroke that depended, unfortunately, on the arrival of Benteen. Just as Reno and Benteen were sitting on their hill to the south raging against Custer, Custer and his staff were, no doubt, raging against Reno and Benteen.
    After twenty minutes had passed, the soldiers of the Left Wing finally began to retrace their steps. A messenger from Keogh may have alerted Custer to the presence of a potentially overwhelming number of Indians to the south, not to mention the fact that there was no sign of Benteen. Custer could have rejoined Keogh and the Right Wing. Calhoun Hill was the best piece of ground they had so far seen for a defensive stand. But that would have required Custer to give up all hope of attacking the Indians to the north. Instead of rejoining Keogh, Custer redeployed the Left Wing in the vicinity of a flat-topped hill about three-quarters of a mile to the north of the Right Wing. Custer’s battalion was still stretched dangerously thin, but now